I’m such a sap

Come November 1st I started listening to SantaRadio.co.uk. I went looking for a channel of holiday music and found this one. I don’t listen quite the way proposed by the site or apps. I use VLC Media Player and stream it in through a URL.

There are dozens of channels around the web that do this. 181FM has a nice set. Still, I use a direct connection (see below).

If you’re not familiar with internet radio, below is an impressive site which gives you access to, well, thousands I’m sure. Many of these I plug in, throughout the year, to have working noise to write code to. Hearing someone speak some language where I have no idea what they’re saying — gives me a sense of company. I work from home (for a decade now) and it’s a lonely activity, at times. Voices, music, noise even, helps my mental state (or so I think, others, no doubt, would beg to differ).

Oddly, I find that most of the channels I find on Radio Garden play American music… Sure, they play their cultural stuff mostly, but if it’s pop, it’s western.

Physically, I would model the brain as a hierarchy of I/O + command modules + feedback/queue/stack modules + lazy executive module.
Logically I’d model it more like a set of self-contained controllers which both respond and relay data up to higher level controllers. Some controllers receive input from multiple controllers, and some are only interacted through a narrow API.

For instance, your fingers’ pain receptors don’t actually have to send the pain to the brain before a reaction occurs. There are closer self-contained modules that can help the fingers yank back from a flame. But that same information is relayed further up to higher modules like the thalamus which would send signals both to the cortex and the adrenal glands. The lazy executive module reacts much more slowly and to very selective stimuli. But this is relative. There would be two levels in the exec module, one responds rather quickly 100-2000 milliseconds (which is still pretty slow) and the other would be the really slow exec module which leisurely seeks memory storage to help provide command instructions.

The logical version is similar but imagine each node both echoing and forwarding information. From the nerves, to the ganglions, to the spine to the brain stem and then into the subsections of the brain, all of these would provide feedback straightaway, but also relay on information further up. The most intense, and repeated signals would make it up into highest levels which, as mentioned, would either react in real time, store for later or store and consider for a more balanced command returned to the body.

Autonomy and redundancy are important aspects which, software wise, would allow a system to continue under partial failure, but also reduce the load of processing exec modules.

Emergence can be leveraged. It’s an extremely important aspect of higher intelligence and environment interaction.
Assemble a massive number of small, self-contained, not very smart things and let them combine and recombine, at will. Funny things happen and behaviors “emerge” when you do this.